CHAPTER III. Blood Statistics

BLOOD STATISTICS

Let us build the new upon the ruins of the old.

The Che-Kas were not instruments of justice: the terminology of the Central Committee, of the organ of “prosecution without mercy,” did not understand them as such. Nor was a Che-Ka a court of inquiry; it was not a tribunal at all. In defining the purpose of the institution, the head of the model Che-Ka laid it down that

We, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, are a military organ, with, for our field of battle, the home front in a civil contest. It is not ours to sit in judgment upon the enemy. It is ours utterly to destroy him. Hence, never must a Che-Ka pardon, for its exclusive business is to exterminate all who may be standing on the other side of the barrier.

And the meaning of such “ruthless prosecution” is not difficult to understand when we recall how to “the dead letter of the law” there succeeded “revolutionary experience” and “the revolutionary sense.” For a sense of any kind is a thing subjective; whilst “experience” in such a connection never fails to lead to tyranny as a matter of fact--in the hands of a certain class of personnel, to the most appalling forms of tyranny. “We are not warring against individual bourgeois,” said Latzis’ article entitled “The Red Terror,” published on Nov. 1, 1918,

We are out to destroy the bourgeoisie as a class. Hence, whenever a bourgeois is under examination the first step should be, not to endeavour to discover material of proof that the accused has opposed the Soviet Government, whether verbally or actually, but to put to the witness the three questions: “To what class does the accused belong?” “What is his origin?” and “Describe his upbringing, education, and profession.” Solely in accordance with the answers to these three questions should his fate be decided. For this is what “Red Terror” means, and what it implies.

Nevertheless Latzis’ formula manufacture lacked originality, for he was but imitating Robespierre in the latter’s address to the Convention of France on the legality of mass terrorism. Said Robespierre: “To execute the enemies of one’s country, one needs but to establish the fact that they are themselves. Not their annihilation, but their chastisement, is what is called for.” As an instruction to the judges of a legal tribunal, the dictum needs no comment.

But, fully to grasp the meaning of the Red Terror, we must first determine the number of its victims.

And in this connection the vast, the unprecedented, area of slaughter covered by the Soviet itself will help us to elucidate the Red Terror’s system of application. Not that it is easy to determine the exact death statistics, and perhaps they never will be determined, seeing that the facts (1) that the names of the executed were published to the extent only of one per cent., (2) that most of the death sentences were carried out in secret dungeons, and (3) that many of the carryings-out were so contrived as to leave no trace behind them combine to render precision of fixation by an historian practically impossible.

The Year 1918

In writing his statistical articles, Latzis said:

The man in the street knows as well as do my colleagues of the Che-Ka that by this time the latter has brought about tens, and even hundreds, of thousands of executions.

This is true. Not for nothing do the three capital letters which stand for the title of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, of the Che-Ka, stand also for the three Russian words which denote “Death to every man.” And though at first Latzis put forward only the fantastically insignificant figure of “22” as the number of victims slaughtered during the first half of the year 1918, he had later to estimate that the number of persons shot in the twenty central provinces during the second half amounted to 4500.

The only thing of which the Che-Ka can be accused is of excessive leniency of application of capital punishment. It cannot be accused of excessive severity in the enforcement of executions, for our strong iron hand has never ceased to seek to lessen its victims. True, local Che-Kas have not always borne this maxim in mind: yet it would be fairer to accuse the Che-Ka in this respect than the provincial institutions. As a matter of fact, we have been too easy-going, too magnanimous, towards our vanquished foe.

Whence it would seem that Latzis conceived even a total of 4500 victims to be too few, although it can easily be shown that, even at that, the Latzian statistics covered but a very limited field. The first volume of The Che-Ka Red Book (which still exists as a publication, and is distributed to responsible Bolshevist officials) furnishes us with an historical document without a parallel. For in that volume is “Order No. 4,” an Order which, dated July 21, 1918, and signed by one Lieutenant Balke, head of the German Commission which the Brest-Litovsk Treaty established, announced to the citizens of Yaroslavl that, the local detachment of the Northern Volunteer Army having surrendered to the Germans, it had therefore been handed over to the Bolshevist authorities, and 428 of its members shot. True, my card index gives the number of persons then executed as 5004!--but then my data concerning provincial localities reached me only casually, and in driblets, or whenever I could succeed in getting hold of a provincial journal.

Also, it must be borne in mind that formation of correct ideas as to numbers of victims was rendered the more difficult through the fact that officials so greatly cultivated brevity of diction. Examples are that once the Che-Ka of the district of Klin (Province of Moscow) announced that “several” counter-revolutionaries had been shot, and the Che-Ka of Voronezh that “many” had been shot, and the Che-Ka of Sestiorelsk (Petrograd) that, “after careful inquiry, some shootings have been carried out,” whilst at all times the Bolshevist press made it its practice to publish reports with such obviously minimised coefficients as “one,” “three,” and the like.

Moreover, never was any statistical information whatsoever given concerning the mass executions with which it was the rule to accompany repressions of peasant and other risings. And the fact wholly puts out of the question exact fixation of numbers of victims sacrificed during the civil war phase. Therefore, my figures are valuable merely in so far as they make clearer than ever how absolutely incomplete are the Latzian returns.

In proportion as Soviet Russia expanded, in like proportion did the “humane activities” of Che-Kas expand, until by the year 1920, Latzis could come out with some fuller data, and state that from the year 1918 onwards as many as 6185 persons had been executed. Yet still there remains the question whether this figure included the thousands of persons whom British returns reported to have been slaughtered in North-Eastern Russia (at Perm and elsewhere) during the period stated, for to the British returns in question there are added the words: “Constantly are persons of all classes, but more especially peasants, to be found resorting to this Consulate with stories of relatives murdered, and of Bolshevist mob fury wreaked.” Moreover, what of the 2000 military officers massacred in Kiev in 1918, of the victims who were either shot or hacked to death in the theatre whither they had been summoned for “verification of their papers”? And what of the naval officers slaughtered in Odessa before the arrival of the Austrian troops (an English clergyman wrote at the time: “I have been told by a member of the Austrian Staff that the Bolshevists have supplied him and his colleagues with a list of over 400 officers murdered in Odessa and the district”), or of the officers slaughtered at Sebastopol, or of the 1342 persons whom General Denikin’s Commission proved to have been shot in Armavir during the January and the February of 1918, or of the Sebastopol hecatomb which V. M. Krasnov’s memoirs have described as carried out in batches of 67, 97, and over?

The truth is that wherever the Bolshevists made their appearance some tens, or even hundreds, of executions followed; executions which no trial whatsoever had preceded; executions which were carried out merely on the strength of sentences passed by a local Che-Ka or some other temporary tribunal. True, these massacres in no way exceeded the other excesses of the civil war, but, for all that, they deserve to have devoted to them a separate chapter.

The Year 1919

Further on in his blood statistics Latzis states that during the year above-named the Che-Kas ordered 3456 persons to be shot. This makes a total of 9641 for the two years, with 7068 of the victims described as counter-revolutionaries, and the rest (this should be carefully noted) as persons shot, not for “bourgeois leanings” or “counter-revolution,” but for such offences against the ordinary law as “lapses in fulfilment of official duty” (632), profiteering (217), and purely criminal acts (204). All of which constitutes proof that during the period in question the Bolshevists used capital punishment not only for coercion of the bourgeoisie, but also (and to a degree never previously attained by a presumably civilised State similarly placed) for service as a general punitive measure.

But, to proceed. Latzis’ figures purport to show that during the September of 1919 the Che-Kas shot only 140 persons, although for the same month--which, be it remembered, coincided with the “liquidation” of the famous counter-revolutionary plot with which the Socialist N. N. Shepkin was connected--the general press of the day gave 66 persons as shot in Moscow alone, and even the Bolshevist press admitted to a figure exceeding 150. Also, we have reliable evidence that, during July of that year, from 100 to 150 persons were shot in Kronstadt, even though 19 names only were made public, and that the Ukraine (where Latzis was raging in person) saw victims shot by the thousand, so that a Red Cross sister sent to England (for subsequent presentation to the International Red Cross Society at Geneva) an estimate of 3000 victims for the city of Kiev alone. And an equally staggering total of Kievan shootings has been given by Nilostonsky, whom I have quoted already as the author of Der Blutrausch des Bolschewismus, and a writer who somehow contrived to acquire a particularly good knowledge of the doings of Kiev’s sixteen operative Che-Kas, and has proved that knowledge by the accuracy of his topographical description, and by the fact that he did not confine himself to personal observations alone, but also utilised the materials published by the Röhrberg Commission, whose members included lawyers and doctors, and by whom exhumed corpses were photographed. Well, Nilostonsky has declared that the subsequently identifiable persons then shot in Kiev amounted to 4800, and that the general total probably amounted to 12,000. For the Terror assumed such unprecedented forms in that city, and in the Ukraine at large, that at last the central authorities themselves felt forced to despatch a commission to inquire into the doings of the provincial Che-Ka. And, in passing, it is only fair to say that ex-prisoners subsequently examined by Denikin’s organisation were unanimous in their commendation of this Bolshevist-appointed mission.

And for a while the development of the Terror in the Ukraine halted; but as soon as ever Denikin evacuated Kiev mass executions became the rule again, and were continued throughout the July and the August of 1919 on such a scale that on a single day (August 16) the Izvestia published the names of 127 persons shot. And these victims, incidentally, were the last to have their names made known by official command.

On the outskirts of Saratov there lies a grisly ravine. It is the scene of a host of local executions. Let me quote the words of an eye-witness as given in that amazing book or compilation which, issued under the title of The Che-Ka, deals exclusively with Che-Ka activity, and was given to the world by the Social Revolutionary Party in Berlin. The exceptional value of the book lies in the fact that its materials were obtained at first hand from prisoners actually confined within prison walls, or from actual eye-witnesses of events, and that the text of it was drawn up by men who had learnt through bitter experience what they were writing about. For impressions from real life are worth all the dead and dry paper in the world, and I knew those men personally, and know, therefore, with what care they sifted their materials until they had made of The Che-Ka an historical document equally graphic and reliable in its description of the Russian phase of to-day. It was for this book’s benefit that a resident of Saratov has drawn the following picture of the Saratov ravine. The ravine lies on the Monastyrsky Slobodka side of the town; and in future years there will be erected there, I hope, a memorial to Saratov’s victims of the Revolution.

As soon as the snow melted in the ravine relatives and friends of the dead began to make their way thither, singly or in groups, but in every case with eyes glancing from side to side. And though at first such pilgrims were turned back by the authorities, in time the number of them became so great that no one could prevent their coming. In places the spring floods had washed away the sand, and left many of the victims of Bolshevist tyranny uncovered, so that knots of them strewed the bed of the ravine from the bridge to the far end, a distance of from 45 to 50 sazheni. And how many were they? Probably no one could say. Even the local Che-Ka does not know. All that is known is that during the last two years (1918 and 1919) at least 1500 victims have been shot in the locality--some in accordance with sentence passed, and some in accordance with no sentence passed. Moreover, it was only during the summer and the autumn seasons that the condemned were brought to this ravine to be shot. In winter-time they were shot elsewhere.... The topmost layer consists of bodies shot as late only as last autumn: wherefore it is still fairly well preserved. The bodies lie clad in shirts alone, with their arms twisted behind them, and tied with cords. Some are thrust into sacks, and some are just as they fell. Truly the hollow is a terrible, a ghastly scene! But visitors do not hesitate to scan it closely. They are looking for some distinctive marking likely to help them in identifying a beloved one’s body. Daily the ravine grows more terrible as daily it engulfs victims. And each fresh batch of executions causes portions of the sides of the ravine to fall in, and to re-bury recently uncovered bodies. Hence the hollow ever grows wider, and ever fresh sacrifices to the Revolution are exhumed by the spring floods.

Is this all a tissue of lies?

In 1920 an equally gruesome utterance by Averbuch was published in Kishinev under the title of The Che-Ka of Odessa. It estimates that during the three months July-September 1919--that is to say, during the time between the official proclamation of the Terror and the Volunteer Army’s occupation of Kharkov--the Terror took a local toll of 2200 lives. But as a matter of fact executions began at Odessa long before the official proclamation of the Red Terror. They began there within a week or a fortnight of the Bolshevists’ capture of the town. Indeed, witnesses who gave evidence before the Denikin Commission were unanimous in saying that local mass shootings began to be carried out as early as the April of 1919, with public announcements of twelve, sixteen, or twenty-six executions at a time. At all events, during that April the local Izvestia wrote with the usual Bolshevist brutality:

The carp enjoys being seethed in cream, and the bourgeois being slain by a Power which is stern, and ready to kill him.... Even though our souls may revolt from the task, let us use strong measures, and bring the bourgeoisie to their senses, seeing that we need but shoot a few dozen of the fools, of the wastrels, and make the rest clean the streets, and set their womenfolk to scour out Red Guard barracks (though even this is too great an honour for them!), for the bourgeoisie to realise that our Government is a Government come to stay, and that it is useless to look for help from Englishmen or Hottentots.

And, on the Volunteer Army approaching the town in June, executions became more frequent still, and the local Izvestia wrote (the Terror had by then become “official”):

The Red Terror has been set in motion, and henceforth let all bourgeois strongholds be scoured out, and the bourgeois made to hiss, and the counter-revolutionary to crackle, under our sanguinary blows.... Let us dislodge such persons from their fastnesses with red-hot irons, and wreak upon them merciless vengeance.

And wreaked that “merciless vengeance” was. And with it went long lists of names which frequently omitted all mention of the “crime” committed, and adduced only a statement that the individual had been shot in the ordinary course of an officially ordained Terror. Margoulies’ book, Years of Fire, instances many such cases.

Almost invariably, too, our information goes to show that these lists of twenty or thirty names represented, in reality, lists curtailed. For example, a woman whose position enabled her to keep a particularly close eye upon events in Odessa has stated that, on one occasion when only eighteen names were published in the local Izvestia, she herself reckoned the shot to have amounted to fifty, and that on another occasion when only twenty-seven names were published, the list comprised, in reality, seventy, inclusive of seven females, although the official communiqué had made no mention of women at all. Also, an “examining member” who had the misfortune to be arrested by his colleagues afterwards deposed that during the local reign of terror as many as sixty-eight persons were shot in a night, whilst official statistics issued by the Denikin Commission tell us that the number of shot in Odessa between April 1 and August 1 amounted to 1300. Lastly, from Niemann’s memoirs we learn that, taking the South of Russia as a whole, the total of victims at that period cannot have reached less than 13,000 or 14,000.

Again, a strike which occurred in Astrakhan during March simply drenched the district with working-people’s blood. An eye-witness has related:

As a meeting of about 10,000 labourers was peaceably discussing the question of wages, suddenly a cordon of sailors and machine-gunners and bombers surrounded the crowd, and, on its not at once dispersing, poured into it a rifle volley, and followed that up with a rattle of machine-guns and a deafening roar of hand grenades. Through the assemblage there ran a sort of shudder: the people seemed to fall forward upon their faces in a short of horrible silence, for the rattling of the machine-guns was such as to drown both the moans of the wounded and the cries of the dying.... Next day all the town seemed empty. Utter stillness reigned. Many had succeeded in escaping elsewhere, and many gone into hiding; but, for all that, the workers lost 2000 through casualties, and the first act of the Astrakhan tragedy came to an end.

Still more tragic was the workers’ affair which began in Astrakhan on March 12. On this occasion the Bolshevists, after winning the “victory,” lodged a portion of their prisoners in six kommandaturs, and the rest upon barges and steamers, one of which, the Gogol, became particularly notorious for the atrocities which she witnessed. Then telegrams concerning the “rebellion” were dispatched to the centre, and Trotsky, head of the Revolutionary War Council, wired back: “Destroy without mercy,” and by the words sealed the fate of the imprisoned workmen. In fact, there then ensued, afloat and ashore, a raging orgy of bloodshed. Some of the prisoners were shot in the cellars and court-yards of the six kommandaturs, and others were hurled into the Volga from the barges and steamers, with stones tied about their necks, or with their hands and feet shackled. One solitary worker saved himself by hiding in an engine-room, and afterwards stated that during the first night alone 180 persons were thrown into the water. And multitudes also were shot in and about the kommandaturs: indeed, so many that it was only with great difficulty that their corpses could be conveyed to the cemetery, and dumped into heaps as “typhus cases.” And the local Che-Ka likewise had to order that if any bearer should “lose” a corpse en route, he himself should be executed. For days every morning dawned upon streets strewn with half-naked, blood-soaked bodies of workmen, and upon relatives wandering in the half light in search of their lost ones.

Those shot on March 12 and 13, the first two days of the repression, were exclusively members of the working classes; but later the authorities realised that they had been foolish enough to put themselves into the position of being unable to blame the bourgeoisie for the disturbance, and hastened to follow the principle of “Better late than never” (and to divert the public’s attention from their cruelty to the proletariat) by seizing any and every bourgeois, and executing those of them who happened to own any sort of immovable property, whether a house, or a shop, or a fishery, or anything else. “At dawn on March 15 not a dwelling in the town was not mourning a father, or a husband, or a brother. Some families, indeed, had lost every male member of their household.” A house-to-house visitation alone could have established the actual number of persons shot. At first the figure 2000 was mentioned, but this grew to 3000 as the authorities published lists of hundreds at a time. And by the end of the month it had grown to 4000. Yet even this did not cause the authorities to abate their punitive measures. They seemed to have made up their minds that the workers of Astrakhan should be compelled to pay also for the many other strikes that were taking place as far away from Astrakhan as Toula, Briansk, and Petrograd. For the March of 1919 saw refusals to work sweep over Russia like a tidal wave. Only towards the close of April did the shootings begin in any way to diminish; and by that time Astrakhan had become a truly deplorable spectacle with its empty streets, its mourning homes, and its “Orders” plastered on fences, shop fronts, and private windows.

Next let us consider that remote Turkhestan where, in January 1919, the Russian section of the population rose in revolt against the Bolshevist tyranny. The rising was quelled.

The affair began with a house-to-house visitation until the barracks and the railway workshops all were overflowing with prisoners. And during the single night of January 20–21 there were so many executions that the authorities had to throw the corpses in heaps upon the railway line. For over 2500 were slaughtered. On the 23rd the task of repressing the rising was transferred to a local court-martial; and to the end of the year this court-martial continued to arrest and shoot victims.

Were these victims, then, included in Latzis’ statistics? Or, if not, why not, seeing that during the early days of the rising the local Che-Ka was still operating in Turkhestan, and that its successor, the court-martial, was but a repetition of that Che-Ka to its very personnel?

The truth is that the question propounded by the Anarchist organisation Troud i Volya (“Labour and Freedom”) on May 20 has never been answered, either by the Pravda or by any other official publication. For the question was based upon information published by the Social Revolutionaries of the Left in No. 4 of their prohibited journal, and ran: “Is it true that daily during the past few months the All-Russian Che-Ka has been executing batches of from twelve to twenty-six victims?” Never will the question be answered, for its very wording enshrined the truth. And it is manifest that that truth came to strike the Bolshevists as a disconcerting verity, for shortly afterwards an official decree transferred the right of passing death sentences exclusively to the permanent revolutionary tribunals. None the less, to the very eve of the promulgation of the decree we see the All-Russian Che-Ka and the Petrograd Che-Ka publishing lists of executed--yes, though the Che-Kas were just about to cease to be competent to execute except in cases of overt rebellion, and not a single such case had occurred in Moscow or Petrograd!

The data which enabled the Social Revolutionary organisation Narodnaya Volya to estimate that the number of persons executed by the Che-Kas during the first three months of the year 1919 amounted to 13,850 are not known to me. But does that estimate seem improbable--does its discrepancy with Latzis’ figure (3456) render it impossible of belief? For my own part, I believe the former, or larger, figure to be the more probable of the two.

And though an estimate of 138,000 as the number of persons shot up to March 20 of 1919 caused the Pravda to say “If this figure were indeed correct it would be a figure truly appalling!” the figure, “appalling” though it may have seemed to Bolshevist journalists, understated the truth.

The Year 1920

For this year Latzis never published any statistics at all, and I myself, during the same year, was unable to continue my card-index library, for I had been flung into a Bolshevist gaol, and the Damocles’ sword of Bolshevist “justice” was hanging over my head.

On February 20 there took place another official “abolition” of capital punishment, and Zinoviev impudently informed a meeting at Halle that “now that the victory over Denikin is won, no more death sentences will be pronounced in Russia!” But, as Martov pointed out, this statement overlooked the fact that always such “abolitions” proved to be temporary in their validity. And this happened on the present occasion, and before long the death penalty again became so “appallingly” (the Pravda’s word) rampant that I do not hesitate to doubt whether any cessation of executions did take place. I feel the less hesitation about it because I know so well the usual Che-Ka procedure on such occasions. Take their manner of applying “amnesties.” I will explain the idea of their modus operandi.

Amongst the terrible inscriptions which condemned prisoners have left upon the walls of the building of the Special Branch of the All-Russian Che-Ka in Moscow there can be seen the lines: “This night, which is the eve of another abolition [of capital punishment], is being turned into a night of blood.” And in the same way the eve of an “amnesty” always meant a fresh holocaust of executions, so that the Che-Kas might previously get rid of as many victims as possible. Yes, the very night hours which saw the printers setting up the type for the morrow’s proclamation would see the prisons converted into scenes of massacre! Not an ex-prisoner but could testify to the horrors of these “pre-amnesty” nights, and I myself shall never forget the night during the October of 1920 when a fresh “amnesty” in honour of the Revolution’s third anniversary was pending, and I was lying in the Butyrka gaol. For during that night so many victims were shot that it was only with difficulty that they could be conveyed to the Kalomikov burial ground. In every case they were shot with a revolver through the back of the head. And whilst all this was happening in Moscow, similar things were happening in the provinces, and we find The Che-Ka relating that at Ekaterinodar the local Che-Ka imitated the Che-Ka of Moscow in causing its special branch to “shoot as usual” even after that the “amnesty” in celebration of the third anniversary had been declared. The Bolshevist press, too, regarded the proclamation only in so far as that it made it an excuse for publication of impudently mendacious and fulsomely eulogistic articles concerning the “mercifulness” and the “generosity” of a power which could grant so many amnesties, and make them embrace its every enemy.

Similarly, in 1921, when a congress of the Communist International was about to be held, seventy persons were executed. True, the story was that they were being executed for such ordinary criminal offences as bribery and abuse of ration cards and theft of stores, but political prisoners who were previously confined with the executed have since expressed the opinion that the true object of the executions was to make blood-sacrifice to the coming congress. Usually, at such times, criminals of the ordinary type could rejoice, for the fact that political prisoners who were on the list for execution began hastily to be removed told its own tale--the tale that another “amnesty” was toward, and the politicals must be slaughtered before the “amnesty” would fall due and entail their release with the “ordinaries.”

“This night, which is the eve of another abolition of capital punishment, is being turned into a night of blood.” Ample proof exists: ample proof that it was usual for the days before any “abolition” or “mitigation” of capital punishment to be converted into days of intensified bloodshed, until the custom practically became a law. Many of these massacres are explainable by no other method.

On January 15, 1920, the Izvestia published a notice signed by Dzherzhinsky, head of the All-Russian Che-Ka. Addressed to the provincial Che-Kas, it ran:

Owing to the recent annihilation of the forces of Judemich, Kolchak, and Denikin, and to the fall of Rostov, Novocherkassk, and Krasnoyarsk, and to the overthrow of the Supreme Autocrat, new conditions have arisen in the struggle with counter-revolutionaries, and cumulative destruction of those counter-revolutionaries’ organised forces has caused a radical blow to be struck at our enemies’ hopes and calculations based upon a possible thwarting of our Peasants’ and Workers’ Rule by means of conspiracies, rebellions, and terrorist outbreaks. Yet there are counter-revolutionaries in Russia who still cherish hopes of the kind, and the State must be defended from such persons, and from the counter-revolutionary efforts which the Entente also is launching against the Peasants’ and Workers’ Government, and from the espionage and disruptive and subversive activities which, in company with the agents of the Entente, ex-Tsarist generals in the service of the same are carrying on in support of our enemies. At the same time, though counter-revolution, within and without the country, lies practically crushed, and has had its extensive organisations for effecting overt counter-strokes and delivering guerilla attacks exterminated, whilst in proportion soviet power has increased, and we find ourselves able at last to dispense with the supreme punitive measure, with the penalty hitherto applicable to opposers of our authority, and though also it is satisfactory for us to be able to report that the taking of Rostov and the capture of Kolchak have enabled the proletariat and its Government conditionally to lay aside the weapon of terrorism, the proletariat and its Government desire it to be remembered that, should the Entente again attempt to employ armed intervention with or without the assistance of mutinous ex-Tsarist generals, and so to disturb the established position of our soviet power, and the peaceful labours of our peasants and workers towards the construction of a new Socialist State, it will be necessary for us to restore terrorist methods, and to lay the responsibility for the soviet power being forced to resume those methods upon the Governments and the governing classes of the Entente, and upon those Russian capitalists who sympathise with them. Meanwhile, let our extraordinary commissions turn their attention to the task of combating the foes represented by economic disorganisation, by speculation, and by negligence in official duty, so that when those foes have been overcome the extraordinary commissions aforesaid may devote their whole efforts to reconstructing our industrial life, and surmounting the obstacles born of sabotage, lack of discipline, and ill-will. In sum, we, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, now decree (1) that from the date of the publication of this decree there be discontinued all applications of the supreme punitive measure, whether in accordance with sentence passed by ourselves, by the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, or in accordance with sentence passed by a local branch of Ourselves, and (2) that Comrade Dzherzhinsky be authorised to lay before both the Council of People’s Commissaries and the All-Russian Executive Committee proposals pertinent to the due abolition of capital punishment, whether by sentence passed by an extraordinary commission, or by sentence passed by an urban or a district tribunal, or by sentence passed by Ourselves, the Supreme Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Let this decree at once be circulated by telegraph.

Those of us, however, who were still prisoners in Moscow, indulged in no rejoicing, for we remembered a decree of a year ago, a decree announcing in an exactly similar manner an end to Red terrorism. The following is taken from an article by Norov in the Vecherniya Izvestia (“Evening News”) of Moscow, as written à propos of the fact that the seventeen Che-Kas of the writer’s locality had just been deprived of their right to make independent pronouncement of death sentences:

At length the Russian proletariat has won the victory, and there is no longer need for terrorism, for the sharp, but perilous, weapon which ever tends to harm its wielder by alienating and intimidating elements otherwise inclined to join in the work of a revolution. Let the proletariat renounce further use of that weapon and, instead, take unto itself legality and right.

Already I have mentioned that in January, 1919, the Soviet of Kiev solemnly pronounced that “capital punishment is herewith abolished within the limits of our jurisdiction.” And though the observer of the day might have been led by this to suppose that the Che-Ka in question had derived its inspiration for “abolition of capital punishment” from the Central Che-Ka itself, we know that the case was otherwise--that the Central Che-Ka in no way favoured the new measure, the “abolition,” but, on the contrary, empowered Dzherzhinsky to assume the initiative only when the “abolition” had irrevocably been decided upon. And so in January the Che-Ka made its usual anticipatory haste to destroy its victims, and to shoot (according to my information) over 300 persons in Moscow alone. Madame Ismailovich, a well-known Left Social Revolutionary who was a prisoner at the time, has stated:

During the night before the promulgation of the decree of abolition of capital punishment, the Che-Ka took from this one gaol (not to speak of others) 120 souls.... And though previously, on the condemned hearing that the decree was going to be issued, they had assembled in the ward and, on the strength of the impending measure, implored a reprieve, both those offering resistance and those who were too weak to do so were butchered like cattle. One day, however, their obituaries will be written on the scroll of history.

And in The Che-Ka another ex-inmate of a Muscovite prison has written:

Although the Soviet Council duly passed the decree and published it on January I (O.S.), the 160 persons who still remained in the Che-Ka building, and in the local cellars and dungeons and concentration camps, were all taken out and shot. They were exclusively persons whom the Che-Ka feared might prove troublesome if left alone, and amongst them were some who had already half completed terms of confinement in one or another concentration camp--an instance being a man named Khvalyusky who, involved in the Lockhart affair (the affair which became so notorious because of the severity of the consequent sentences), had been given five years’ imprisonment. All throughout the 13th and the 14th (N.S.) people were shot. And in the course of the morning of the 13th the Che-Ka forwarded to our prison hospital a man so badly wounded in the jaw and tongue that it was only by signs that he could explain to us that he had duly been “executed,” but not killed outright, and then remitted to the surgical ward. And whilst making the signs his face was radiant, and his glance beaming. Clearly he was finding it difficult to credit his good fortune. And though to this day I do not know his name, nor what the affair in which he had become involved, I do know that on the next night he was taken away (his bandages still upon him), and shot a second time.

Similarly in Petrograd the eve of the “abolition of capital punishment” was celebrated with shootings--with 400 of them, so that the slaughter lasted all night. And in Saratov too (according to a private letter) were fifty-two persons shot. And the same, as a matter of fact, everywhere else.

Hence the doing away with the death penalty meant no more than that the Che-Kas continued, unchanged, their high-handed proceedings. Yet one difference there was, and it lay in a certain cunning mental reservation. I will explain. On February 5 of that year the Izvestia reported that the provincial Che-Ka of Kiev had received a telegram from the head of the All-Russian Che-Ka, and that the telegram had explained that the decree concerning capital punishment had never been meant to apply to places at the front, and that the revolutionary tribunals at “places at the front” still might pass death sentences. “That front,” the telegraphic explanation had added, “includes both Kiev and its province.” And this piece of unexampled, unblushing effrontery the Special Branch of the Central Che-Ka clinched with a circular that:

In view of the abolition of the death penalty, it is suggested that persons whose crimes would otherwise have rendered them liable to the supreme punitive measure do now be dispatched to the zone of military operations, where the decree concerning capital punishment has no force!

I myself remember an “examining justice” telling one of my comrades (a man who had been arrested for “counter-revolution” during the February of 1920) that, “although we cannot shoot you here, we can send you to the front for the purpose.” And that “front” (it needs hardly to be added) was by no means limited to the regions where civil war was in actual progress. But in time this subterfuge, “the front,” came to be thought unnecessary. And possibly some of the Che-Kas never resorted to it, seeing that at all times Che-Ka work could be done in secret. Or, if they resorted to it, they did so only in exceptional cases. At times even the Izvestia forgot the “abolition,” and once had the inadvertence to come out with a list of 521 persons shot actually between the “abolition” and the following May--176 of them put to death by one or another provincial tribunal, and the rest by the Muscovite Che-Ka itself! However, on May 24 capital punishment became officially re-established, on the plea that that course had been rendered necessary by the events of the Russo-Polish War. Which re-establishment has never since been repealed.

Peculiarly interesting is an Order issued by Trotsky on June 16; and the more so if it be compared with the appeal of 1917. The Order said:

(1) Scoundrels advocating retreat must be looked upon as defaulters, as having refused to carry out a military command, and be shot. (2) Soldiers voluntarily leaving the front shall be shot. (3) Soldiers throwing away rifles, or selling their equipment, shall be shot.

This after that the All-Russian Congress of Soviets had said: “The capital penalty which Kerensky established at the front is herewith abolished”!

Hence both at the front and everywhere else the re-establishment of capital punishment brought in a new orgy of executions. To begin with, in September 1919, a mutiny of the garrison in Smolensk was ruthlessly suppressed with the shooting not only of 1200 soldiers, but also of a large number of civilian participators in the émeute. And though the Central Che-Ka ordered metropolitan journals to cease reporting shootings when they were ordered by the Che-Ka itself, those journals still published information concerning executions when they were ordered by the military-revolutionary tribunals of the provinces. In which connection the official figures given were truly terrible, for, according to them, 600 persons had been shot between May 22 and June 22, and 898 during the following month, and 1183 during the next, and 1206 during the next. But invariably information of the kind was held up until at least a month after the event--the fate of the 1206 victims shot during September, for example, being reported by the Izvestia only on October 17, with names and “crimes” appended. The “crimes” in question read all the more curiously when we recall how Red terrorism usually is justified. For the return says that shot for espionage were 3 persons, for treason 185, for refusal to carry out military orders 14, for mutiny 65, for counter-revolutionary activity 59, for desertion 467, for looting and brigandage 160, for concealment of arms 23, for drunkenness and insubordination 20, and for lapses in official duty 181. Whence it is no wonder that we can only with difficulty trace method in the dispensation of Bolshevist “justice”! Next, on November 12, 1920, the Izvestia reported, as shot between February and September, 283 persons sentenced merely by order of the revolutionary tribunals attached to the Vokhra or “Home Service Army” (the Che-Ka’s real instrument of operation): and as I myself possess a copy of such a sentence, I can see that it was published in the Muscovite Izvestia of November 18, and relates to Trounov, an engineer, to one S. S. Mikhno, ex-head of a minor administrative department, and to one N. S. Mikhno, ex-head of the artillery supply branch of the T.A.O.N.A.--all sentenced to death for “abuse of official functions” by the Vokhra’s head military-revolutionary tribunal. And, adds the document: “This award is final, and cannot be appealed from to a higher court.”

In short, in the maze of blood statistics one could easily lose one’s way. For blood flowed wherever Soviet Russia encountered the smallest check in life. Thus, during the summer of 1920 twenty doctors of Moscow were arraigned on a charge of having connived at exemptions from military service, and shot; whilst later 500 others of the provinces were arraigned and shot in the same manner, and to the official press publication of their names there was appended an intimation that probably their patients would experience a similar fate. “Up to the very last moment,” says a prisoner who lived with these doctors for a time in the Butyrka gaol, “they did not, could not, believe that they were going to be put to death.” Moreover, unofficial sources have given their number as larger even than was given by the official return. And when, during the autumn of 1920, disturbances broke out amongst the Moscow garrison, and the inhabitants heard no more than vague rumours that soldiers were being shot in the Che-Ka building, the foreign-published Russian journal Volya Rossii (“The Will of Russia,” a Social Revolutionary organ) published (under date of November 21) a definite list of those shot, which showed them to have amounted to between 200 and 300, whilst to this the Posledniya Novosty appended 900 for October, and 118 for December. Again, a correspondent of the Volya Rossii estimated the number of persons shot in Petrograd during that autumn to have reached 5000, largely because, at the time, the various “risings” and “conspiracies” in connection with General Judenich’s advance were being “liquidated.” And we read in the Posledniya Novosty of the summer an émigré’s story of the rounding up, medical inspection, and shooting of a number of syphilitic subjects--“with a view to combating prostitution”! And I, too, heard of such an occurrence, though I could not verify it, nor yet some persistent rumours concerning a shooting of Muscovite sufferers from glanders. Yet there can be no doubt that things just as monstrous, just as incredible, did come to be facts, and were not evolved from the imagination, under this unprecedented régime.

The North

Many sources are to hand shedding light upon the conduct of the civil war in Northern Russia. Even in Moscow we used to hear terrible stories concerning the punitive expeditions which the Special Branch of the All-Russian Che-Ka periodically dispatched to Vologda and other northern localities under a man called Kedrov. These expeditions were a sort of circuit assize, a new tribunal of the Che-Ka’s own invention. Kedrov has since, I believe, been certified to be a lunatic, and confined as such; but at the time of which I am speaking he had become renowned for his cruelty, and we gain but a very faint idea of his punitive expeditions from the fragmentary reports published in the local press. True, occasionally that press did state that some hundreds of persons had been imprisoned, and dozens of other persons shot, after an “administrative-operative” (or a “revolutionary-military”) tour of inspection; but more often it gave vaguer news altogether--an example being that it scarcely made any mention at all of an expedition when Kedrov “re-examined” 1000 officers, and despatched to the centre of Russia a veritable multitude of hostages.

Kedrov’s conduct when leading an expedition to the extreme North never failed to be consistent: so that, compared with him, the Eydouk who shot officers with his own hand was a man sheerly humane. Periodically would the Izvestia of Archangel publish lists of persons to whom the Kedrov Commission had applied “the supreme punitive measure,” and such a list lies before me now--a list of thirty-six names which is dated November 2, and includes peasants, co-operative employees, and a citizen who, an ex-member of the Duma, was a well-known inhabitant of Vyborg. And in another such list I find thirty-four names of persons shot for “active counter-revolution” during the Chaikovsky-Miller régime, and, in a third, twenty-two names, inclusive of the mayor of Archangel, of the editor of the Severnoyé Slovo or “Northern Word,” of the local postmaster, of a theatrical manager, of a shop assistant, and of several others. And elsewhere has a correspondent of the Posledniya Novosty testified to “shootings of boys and girls of twelve, sixteen, and so forth,” so that Archangel came to be known as “The City of the Dead.” And we have it from a correspondent of the Golos Rossii (“The Voice of Russia”), from a correspondent able to provide first-hand evidence through having been resident in the town throughout the April of 1920, that:

Before the British troops had long been gone there was held a mock procession of empty red coffins, and then reprisals began.... All through that summer the town fairly groaned under the terrorist scourge; and though I lack figures to check the exact number of persons slaughtered there, at least I know that 800 ex-officers were put to death--officers whom the late Miller administration had authorised to proceed to London by way of the Mourmansk railway whilst the members of the administration crossed to Mourmansk on icebreakers. All of them were seized by the Bolshevists en route, and shot.

But it was in the Kholmogory district that the greatest number of executions of all took place. Said a correspondent in the Revolutsionnaya Rossia:

Last September, when a “day of Red vengeance” was held, over 2000 people were shot. Mostly they were peasants and other Cossacks from the South. For it is not often now that intellectuals are executed. Probably this is because very few of them remain to be executed.

But what is the meaning of that phrase “peasants and other Cossacks from the South”? The meaning of it is that a host of persons had been brought to Northern Russia from the South, for internment in the northern concentration camps, since that was the Southern Che-Kas’ favourite resource with their victims; they sent them to the northern camps, especially to the camp at Archangel, as one would send a person to certain death. And when we come to consider those “abodes of terror” (whence the condemned wretches seldom or never departed alive--they departed thence only after that they had been executed) we shall see that to be sent to such places practically was capital punishment.

And similar methods were the rule in the Don and the Kuban regions, in Turkhestan, and in the Crimea, where the procedure was that suddenly there would be issued orders for a “registration” or a “re-registration” of ex-White officers and men, and that as soon as the loyalists concerned had reached the place indicated (they never seemed to think that anything untoward could be pending) they would be seized, bundled into railway trucks, and, just in the clothes in which they happened to be standing up, dispatched to Archangel, where the fact that they were wearing garments suitable enough for the climate of Kuban and of the Crimea, but not for the atmospheric conditions of the remoter north, would join with the circumstance that the lack of washing facilities inevitably converted their bodies into masses of vermin to bring about, surely and speedily, the desired end--and the more so because the chance of obtaining warmer clothing from their relatives at home was as negligible as was the chance of being able to let those relatives know where the sufferers were.

The same procedure, too, was adopted in Petrograd towards that section of the Baltic Fleet’s officers and men who had failed either to emigrate, or to go into hiding, or to join the forces of Judenich or Kolchak or Denikin. Presumably these men had served the Soviet Power loyally, for but few arrests amongst them had taken place during the four years of the Bolshevists’ administration: wherefore when, on August 22, 1921, a “re-registration” was ordained, the men thought nothing of it as they left their ships, and went ashore, to go through a process to which they had become so well accustomed. But, arrived ashore, they were conducted, one by one, into a room, and there told to wait. And they waited for two days. And then, under a strong escort, they were marched to the railway station, bundled into luggage vans, and forwarded (with no explanation given) to prisons at Orel and Vologda and Yaroslavl and elsewhere. No one ever discovered the subsequent whereabouts of those men. All that official lists said of them was that they had been “sent northward,” though from private conversations with Che-Ka employees it was gathered, in addition, that their chance of long remaining alive was a slender one.

Of Kedrov’s northern exploits we obtain a glimpse when we read in the Volya Rossii: “In Archangel, once, he mustered 1200 officers, took them over to Kholmogory, loaded them on to barges, and riddled them with machine-gun fire. Fully half of them were killed.”

Perhaps such a senseless, vile proceeding seems incredible. Yet it is but a typical example of the fate which befell the vast majority of those who were sent to the Kholmogory camp. First pitched, in May 1921, in a spot some ten versts from Kholmogory, this settlement never ceased thenceforth to witness shootings in batches of from 10 to 100. Indeed, when matters reached the pass that an official investigator had to be sent northward he was told by the local inhabitants that the number of persons who had been disposed of to date could not have reached less than 8000. Not but that in the long run even such cruelty as this may not have proved to be kindness, seeing that in any case the Kholmogory camp, the “camp of death,” saw to it that prisoners perished, slowly and surely, of ill-treatment and neglect.

And though it may be difficult for the moral sense to realise that drownings of people by barge-loads could ever have existed as a Russian official institution, seeing that such a system in the twentieth century recalls the worst doings of the eighteenth-century French Revolution, the barges in question are no fiction; and I can add to the two recent cases already cited a third one, more recent still, to show that the practice, once started, went on unchanged. The case is to be found related in Vladimir Voitinsky’s preface to his work The Twelve Condemned, a work which turns upon the great trial of Social Revolutionaries in Moscow. We read:

In 1921 the Bolshevists took 600 persons from different prisons of Petrograd, dispatched them to Kronstadt, loaded them on to a barge, and scuttled the vessel at a particularly deep spot. All but one were drowned. And he only escaped because he was able to swim to the Finnish shore.

After Denikin’s Departure.

Nevertheless, all these horrors pale, numerically at least, before the happenings in the South after the close of the civil war and the collapse of the Denikin Government. For it is then that we see coming into being a new Government, and that Government entering upon its functions amid a sea of blood, and wreaking both private and official vengeance through terrorism, and replacing civil war with a policy of complete annihilation of the surviving enemy, and of preventive intimidation of the civilian population. As soon as ever, in 1920, the Bolshevists had made their third entry into Odessa, daily executions of 100 or more persons became the rule, and motor-lorries had to cart away the dead in heaps.

“Life here is like living upon a volcano,” said a private letter to the editor of the Posledniya Novosty. “Daily mass arrests of counter-revolutionaries take place in every quarter of the town, and individual arrests and domiciliary searches. It is sufficient for anyone to inform the authorities that such and such a family has a relative serving in the Volunteer army for a plundering of that family’s house to be carried through forthwith, and the family itself to be made prisoners. Unlike last year, however, the Bolshevists now execute their victims very quickly, and publish no slaughter lists.”

Again, we find a Constantinople correspondent of the Obstchoyé Delo, a man who knew well what was happening in Odessa, sending his journal a heart-rending series of accounts of life in that city, and saying that official information showed the number of persons who had been shot to date to amount to 7000, since at least 30 or 40 had been executed nightly, and sometimes as many as 200--even as 300.

Machine-guns did the work: the victims were too numerous for individual execution. Nor was any publication made of the names of the shot; the prisoners were just taken from the gaol by a wardful at a time, and exterminated.

An exaggeration? Possibly. But at least an exaggeration resembling known facts, seeing that there stands on record the massacre of the ex-officers captured on the Roumanian frontier when attempting to escape to the forces of General Bredov. The attempt failed because the Roumanian Government refused to accord the fugitives licence of passage across the river Dnieper, and subsequently the 1200 officers were dispatched to concentration camps, and executed there. And as regards their execution on May 5, I agree that one can scarcely believe the story that, owing to the Izvestia having published an announcement of the hecatomb, certain persons tolled the local church bells overnight, and the local ecclesiastics were subsequently arraigned and allotted sentences of from five to ten years.

To about the same period there may be assigned the execution of a number of Galicians who had played the Bolshevists false. The ex-Galician garrison of Tiraspol was shot to the last man, and, by orders from Odessa, the rest were sentenced to be punished for their “treason” with deportation. But no sooner had these Galicians, with their wives and children, assembled at the goods station than machine-gun fire was poured into them en masse, and such of the “traitors to the proletariat” (to quote the Izvestia) as were not killed thereby were done to death by a goaded-on Bolshevist mob.

Like shootings took place when the Crimea had been seized. “All persons of the region to whom I spoke,” says a correspondent, “were unanimous in declaring that they had seen a list of 119 persons as shot on December 24.” And, of course, the real number was, quite justifiably, rumoured to have amounted to 300. The shot on this occasion had been persons accused of participation in the so-called “Polish counter-revolutionary organisation.” As a matter of fact that organisation had been engineered by agents-provocateurs in the employ of the local Che-Ka, and the agents had been given the job for the same reason as was the case when the “Wrangel conspiracy” caused sixty employees of the Shipping and Trading Company, and thirty-one other persons, to be shot for “espionage”: namely, that the agents might at least have their energies devoted to something.

And the same informant tells us that “when the Bolshevists were in Ekaterinodar every prison there was overcrowded with inmates, most of whom were destined to be shot.” To which a local citizen has added that between the August of 1920 and the February of 1921 the prisons of the town saw 300 victims slaughtered.

Most of the shootings of that year, however, took place in August, when, on Wrangel’s forces reaching the Kuban region, the head of the Kuban Che-Ka ordered that “all persons now lying in the cells of the Che-Ka building be shot,” and answered a Che-Ka employee named Kossolapov, who had protested against the order on the ground of many of the prisoners not having been so much as examined, and others having been arrested merely for an infringement of the regulation prohibiting departure from a dwelling-house after eight o’clock at night, with the instruction: “Then separate those eight o’clock prisoners from their companions, and shoot the rest.” This was duly carried out, and a local citizen named Rakitzansky, who was one of the seized, has described how it was done. His account says:

We were led forth from the cells in batches of ten, but were quite calm, for, on the first batch being removed elsewhere, we were told that the reason for their removal was that they might be questioned only. But when the second batch was removed we realised that the purpose of the removal was execution, and sure enough, those who were taken away were butchered like cattle.

With which the informant relates how he himself escaped death. He did so only through the fact that, as the Bolshevists happened at the time to be preparing to evacuate the town, the Che-Ka’s documents lay ready packed up, and therefore the executions were taking place without the usual preliminary formalities--merely with a putting to each prisoner, when summoned to slaughter, of the question, “Of what crime do you stand accused?” And since Rakitzansky noticed that any prisoner who stood accused only of having infringed the curfew order was set aside from the rest, he too said, when his turn came, that he had been arrested for having been found out of doors after nightfall, though in reality he had been arrested as an ex-officer--and so saved his life.

These executions were carried out by the Che-Ka’s entire staff, and on the prison premises. Artabekov, the chief, himself gave the word to fire on each occasion, and the firings went on for twenty-four hours, during which time the neighbouring dwellers must have sat benumbed with terror. Two thousand persons were shot, but their names and their “crimes” still remain unknown, and probably always will remain unknown. Not even the Che-Ka’s employees could throw light upon the point, for such men have come to look upon shootings as a trade, as an outlet for their sadistic tendencies, as a resource which calls neither for ceremony nor for any established procedure.

Again, in Ekaterinodar, on October 30, 84 persons were shot; during November, 100; on December 22, 184; on January 24, 210; and on February 5, 94. And there can be no doubt about these items, for, although the local Che-Ka believed itself to have destroyed all its documents, we have it from an eye-witness that subsequently “whole bundles of papers, inscribed ‘To be shot,’ were discovered in some earth closets.”

Take another picture of life in Ekaterinodar at this period:

Between August 17 and August 20 the tenour of our existence was disturbed by troops of Wrangel’s landing near Primorsko-Aktarskaya Stanitza, and proceeding to attack the town. A panic ensued, and Artabekov, our “Special Representative,” ordered all persons who had been arrested by the local Che-Ka, or by its special branch, to be shot forthwith. At the time the provincial Che-Ka and the special branch had on their premises 1600 persons, and these were taken across the Kuban in batches of 100, and slaughtered with machine-gun fire. And a like course was pursued in the prison itself; save that there the inmates were shot against a wall. Lastly, public announcement of the affair was made, and lists of the executed published in columns headed “Retribution.” Yet the number of names published was a good deal smaller than the reality. Also, when the Bolshevists were setting about their disorderly flight, they told the workers that if they (the workers) did not come with them they (the Bolshevists) would, on their return, hang every worker who had remained behind to a telegraph pole.

Similar events befell when Wrangel came to menace Ekaterinoslav, and the town was evacuated. Indeed, everywhere such events befell, and when the Bolshevist forces were retreating from Vinitza and Kamenetz-Podolsk the Kharkov Izvestia (the organ of the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka) published lists of hostages shot to the number of 217, with names of peasants, thirteen teachers, several doctors and engineers, a rabbi, and a number of landowners and ex-officers included. The same, again, whenever the Bolshevist forces were on the advance. For example, no sooner was Kamenetz-Podolsk retaken than eighty Ukrainians were shot, and 164 seized and dispatched to the central provinces. Also, a correspondent of the Revolutsionnaya Rossia gives us the following description of Rostov-on-Don doings during the first few months of the new Government’s rule:

Merciless, shameless looting is going on, with the Bolshevists robbing the shops and houses of the bourgeoisie, but, still more, the co-operative stores. And they keep shooting officers, or else hacking them to pieces with swords--sometimes in the street as soon as caught, and sometimes in the officers’ homes.... Recently, too, they set fire to the military hospital on the corner of the Taganrog Prospekt and Temeritskaya Street, although the building was crowded with sick and wounded officers at the time, and many of the latter were too weak to move. In fact, forty were burnt to death.... The exact number of shot and hacked is not yet known. All that is known is that the number must have been very large. And with each addition to the local soviet’s power its methods are growing bolder. First it placed the whole of the Cossack population under surveillance. Then it brought into operation a Che-Ka under Peters, and kept the engines of two motor lorries in constant running, that the sound of the shots might not be heard outside the building.... Peters frequently attends the executions in person. They take place in batches, with perhaps as many as ninety persons shot in a single night.

Also, Red Guards have told us that Peters’ little son of eight or nine will run after him and cry: “Daddy, daddy, let me do it too!”

Associated with the local Che-Kas were local revolutionary tribunals and soviets. Nor, frequently, were captured persons looked upon as prisoners of war, but dubbed, rather, for the purpose of being shot, agents-provocateurs, or else “bandits.” This is how the “trial” of Colonel Sukharevsky at Rostov was engineered; and the same with a “trial” of a Cossack named Sniegirev at Ekaterinodar, and with the “trial” of a student named Stepnaov and others at Touapse.

In and around Stavropol wives were shot for having failed to notify that their husbands had fled. And even children of fifteen and sixteen were shot, and persons of sixty--yes, shot with machine-guns, or else hacked to pieces with swords. Nightly shootings took place in Piatigorsk and Essentouky and Kislovodsk, whilst the lists of the slaughtered (amounting to some 240 names apiece) would be headed “Blood for blood,” and conclude with the words “To be continued.” And as regards a pretext for the orgy, it was found in the assassination of one Lenitzov, head of the Che-Ka of Piatigorsk, and of a certain Lapin, a military commissary--both of these fellows having been stopped in a motor car by a posse of horsemen.

The Crimea after Wrangel’s Departure.

For months after the “liquidation” of the Denikin régime exploits like the foregoing were continued. Next, Wrangel came and went, with the numbers of victims growing to tens of thousands, and the Crimea coming to be known as “The All-Russian Cemetery,” and refugees thence reaching Moscow with terrible tales of what had happened. Indeed, at this period the journal Za Narod (“For the People”) estimated the total of those shot in the Crimea to have reached 50,000, whilst other computers have placed it variously at 100,000, at 120,000, and at 150,000. But it is impossible to say which of these figures approaches most nearly to the truth. All that can really be said is that, even if the total was smaller, far smaller, than any of the figures given above, that does not lessen the cruelty, the abomination, of slaughtering persons after Frunze, the then Commander-in-Chief, had guaranteed them an “amnesty.” And another functionary active in the Crimea was Bela Kun, the notorious Hungarian journalist, who was not ashamed to say publicly:

Comrade Trotsky has declined to visit the Crimea so long as a single counter-revolutionary remains alive there. But as the Crimea is a bottle-neck whence no counter-revolutionary can possibly escape, it will not be long before we have raised it from its revolutionary level of three years behind the times to the general revolutionary level of Russia.

And so the Crimea was “raised” to that level. And the method employed for raising it was the method of perpetrating such a series of mass executions as stands without parallel in history. Not only were people shot by scores at a time; they were also hacked to pieces, and, as often as not, before the very eyes of their relatives. Said an insistent telegram from Skliansky (Trotsky’s temporary substitute on the Central Revolutionary-Military Council): “Let the struggle continue until not a single White officer remains alive on Crimean soil.” Later the All-Russian Executive Committee held an enquiry into the massacres of 1920 and 1921, and, on questioning commandants of towns, found all of them (according to the Roul) to cite in their defence a second telegram sent them either by Bela Kun or by Bela’s “secretary” (a woman known as ”Zemliachka,” or “the Country Woman,” though her real name was Samoilova, with her “special services rendered” rewarded, in March, 1921, with “the Order of the Red Flag”) for the purpose of bidding all such town commandants summon for “registration” (and execution) all ex-officers, and all ex-officials of the late War Ministry (under Wrangel’s Government) who might be resident in their districts. At all events, it was upon such a “registration” basis that the executions were carried out. And subsequently, A. V. Ossokin stated to the Lausanne Tribunal that “the queues waiting to register ran to thousands in length, as though each man had been seeking to win the race to the grave.”

And for months the slaughter continued, and a nightly rattle of machine-guns was heard. The first night alone saw thousands of victims fall--1800 in Simferopol, 420 in Theodosia, 1300 in Kertch, and so forth. But at last, in dealing with such large numbers, difficulties were encountered, for though the majority of the victims were stupefied with terror, some did retain sufficient presence of mind to attempt escape, and it became necessary to shoot smaller parties at a time, and to divide the nightly quotas into two shifts each--Theodosia, for example, making the two half-quotas each include 60, or a total of 120 to a night. And during the shootings the occupants of the neighbouring dwellings were forbidden to leave their homes on pain of death--they had to sit and bear the torturing horror of the sounds as best they could. And a special danger beset them in the fact that, perhaps, a half-shot victim would come crawling to their door and moan for help, and so involve the occupants of the dwelling in the risk of losing their own lives if mercifully they should take him in.

At first the corpses were disposed of by dumping them into the ancient Genoese wells; but in time even these wells became filled up, and the condemned had to be marched out into the country during the daytime (ostensibly, “to work in the mines”) and there made to dig huge graves before daylight should fail, and then be locked into sheds for an hour or two, and, with the fall of dusk, stripped except for the little crosses around their necks, and shot. And as they were shot they fell forward in layers. And as they fell forward their own layer of quivering bodies speedily became covered with the following layer; and so on until the graves lay filled to the margin. Only when morning came did any victim who seemed to be still breathing have his brains dashed out with a piece of rock. And, for that matter, many were buried alive.

At Kertch the Bolshevists organised what they called “trips to Kuban,” when the victims were taken out to sea, and drowned, and their terror-stricken wives and mothers flogged with nagaiki or, in a few cases, shot along with their sons or husbands. And for a long time bodies of such women, with babes still clasped to their breasts, could be seen lying outside the Jewish cemetery at Simferopol. At Yalta and Sevastopol stretcher patients were carried from the hospitals, and shot. And these victims were not exclusively ex-officers. On the contrary, they included common soldiers, doctors, nurses, teachers, railwaymen, priests, and peasants.

And when the towns’ quotas of victims had become exhausted the Bolshevists began to draw also upon the villages, where, as a rule, the slaughter was carried out on the spot. And meanwhile mass arrests of hostages began in the towns, and in Simferopol alone 12,000 were seized on December 19 and 20. Next, this phase of the delirium having passed, the Bolshevists took to imprisoning people on the strength of certain “inquiry forms.” The procedure in this case was as follows. All ex-officials and persons over the age of sixteen had to fill in several dozen documents requiring answers to forty or fifty questions; and these questions went carefully into every detail of the examinee’s life during the examinee’s every year of existence. Most of all was attention paid to the examinee’s origin and social position, and position vis-à-vis a father’s or a grandfather’s or an uncle’s or an aunt’s property--also to the examinee’s sympathy with, or antipathy to, the Red Terror, the Allies, and Poland, and to the question whether or not the examinee had sided with Wrangel, and, if so, why he or she had not fled to join that General’s forces. Each such query had, willy nilly, to be answered. And after a fortnight or so the “registered” had to attend before the local Che-Ka, and be questioned further, and subjected to a bombardment with unexpected and wholly irrelevant inquiries. Only if an examinee finally passed this test did he or she receive a certified “enquiry form,” coupled with a reminder that thenceforth the examinee’s life stood in fee to the correctitude of the information contained in the form.

Of those who contrived, after all this, to remain in the present world, a large number were sent to the concentration camps of the North, where usually they found their last resting-place. Even if a prisoner did escape from such a camp he brought down summary vengeance upon his non-escaped comrades--an instance being that, once when a party of six officers got clear of the concentration camp at Vladislavlevo railway station, thirty-eight of their fellows were executed forthwith.

For its part, the Che-Ka of Kertch adopted the plan of registering the population simultaneously, en masse, and, for the purpose, surrounded the town with a cordon of patrols, and then ordered the local inhabitants to lay in three days’ stores, and forbear to leave their dwellings on pain of death. The subsequent inquiry conducted resulted in a dividing of the population into three categories, with the 800 members of the first category notified in the Kertch Izvestia as “persons who have taken an active part in the late campaign” [against General Wrangel]. When they were shot their surviving fellow townsmen reckoned that their real number had amounted to at least double the official figure given.

But it was at Balaklava and Sebastopol that the greatest number of executions took place, for, if we are to credit certain statements made by eye-witnesses, the Che-Kas of the two townships shot a joint total of 29,000 souls, with, amongst them, at Sebastopol, 500 stevedores for having helped to embark General Wrangel’s army. Also, when the Izvestia published (on November 28) the first general list for the region, that list of 634 names was seen to comprise 278 names of women; whilst when, on November 30, a second general list was published, 88 of its 1202 names, again, were feminine names. Hence it has been estimated that during the first week of the Bolshevists’ rule of the Crimea Sebastopol alone saw over 8,000 souls put to death. And it was not only shootings that were carried out in Sebastopol. There were carried out there, and for the first time, also hangings. Indeed, hundreds of prisoners were executed in this manner, and both the Posledniya Novosty and the Dielo and the Roul of the period repeat nerve-shattering stories related to them by the few people (mostly foreigners) who subsequently contrived to get clear of the Crimea’s confines. Possibly reminiscences of the sort were partially subjective; yet to discredit them in whole is sheerly impossible. Wrote a correspondent to the Roul:

In time the Nakhimovsky Prospekt became simply festooned with corpses of officers and private soldiers and civilians who, arrested then and there in the street, had been executed on the spot of arrest, and hurriedly, and with no previous trial.

And wrote a correspondent to the Dielo:

The city is like a city of the dead, with the population lying hidden in cellars and lofts, and every fence and wall and telegraph post and telephone standard and shop front and signboard plastered over with posters saying “Death to the Traitors!”

And from another eye-witness we have it that “officers were hanged in full uniform, complete to the epaulets, but civilians in underwear only. And there they swung to and fro ‘as a warning to others.’”

Yes, every available pole and monument was used for the purpose, and also every available tree. In particular did the Istorichesky Prospekt become richly garnished with wind-swayed corpses; and the same with the Nakhimovsky Prospekt, Ekaterinskaya Street, Bolshaya-Morskaya Street, and the Primorsky Boulevard. Previously Commandant Bothmer, the lieutenant of the German contingent hitherto in occupation of the Crimea, had ordered the population not to make any complaints against the Soviet’s officials, “since such complaints only help the White Guards in their resistance.” And such was the orgy of madness and slaughter as to include even shootings of sick and wounded from the hospitals--of a batch of 272 persons from the Zemstvo’s sanatorium at Aloupka, and of doctors and Red Cross nurses (we find seventeen nurses’ names in a single list) and Zemstvo employees and the well-known National Societist A. P. Laurier (with, as accusation against him, that he had been editor of the Youzhniya Viedomosty or “Southern Intelligencer”!) and Plekhanov’s secretary, the Social Democrat Loubimov, and many others who had taken no part whatsoever--at all events, no active part--in the struggle.

In fact, these lists might well have had appended to them the words of Ivan the Terrible under similar circumstances: “Together with a great multitude of others whose names Thou alone, O Lord, wilt remember.” And said a correspondent of the Social Revolutionary journal Volya Rossii or “The Will of Russia”: “Even such names of the slain as the Bolshevists reported amounted to thousands.”

The Year 1921

During this year also the Terror in the Crimea continued, so that A. V. Ossokin stated before the Lausanne Tribunal:

During July last over 500 hostages were imprisoned on charges of having communicated with the Greens. And before the year was out many of these hostages even were executed, with some twelve or thirteen women included amongst their number--three in Eupatoria during April, five in Simferopol on March 25 (O.S.), one in Kapasoubayar during April, and three or four in Sebastopol during the same month, with, as principal accusation against them, either that they had helped relatives to escape to the mountains or that they had furnished persons contemplating such a course with provisions, though in reality the accused had furnished the provisions without knowing that the persons whom they thus assisted were not refugees at all, but disguised Red Guards and agents provocateurs.

Also, whole villages were presented with an ultimatum that “unless you people recall those of your inhabitants who have taken to the mountains, you shall have your village burnt over your heads.” Demerdzhi, Shoumi, Korbek and Sabli were amongst the villages so addressed. However, the threat in no case came really to be fulfilled, for, on its utterance, the Greens issued a counter-proclamation that in such a case they would slaughter every Communist family and individual Communist whom they could catch, whether in town or in village.

And in Ekaterinoslav and the Northern Taurus, during the winter of 1921–22, the same policy of hostage seizure shed rivers of blood. Also, wholesale disarmaments of villages took place; the procedure being to fix a given quota of arms for surrender, within twenty-four hours, by a given village, and if (as usually happened) the quota specified exceeded the whole store of arms possessed by the village, to seize ten or fifteen of the villagers as hostages, and then, on definite ascertainment that the village could not comply with the order issued, to shoot the hostages in the fashion which had become stereotyped.

And, on a base used by the Greens being discovered near Theodosia, three boys and four girls (all aged about sixteen) were shot. Similarly, a trial of Greens in Simferopol resulted in the deaths of twenty-two persons, including a local university lecturer, and some others.

And ever as the Krim Rosta reported new “conspiracies” there followed upon the discoveries executions, even though the “conspiracies” had seldom had any connection whatsoever with the Greens. And also upon the Tartar population did the Terror descend. During August several scores of Mahomedans were shot for “holding a counter-revolutionary meeting in their Mosque.”

In September two parties of Greens under a Tartar named Malamboutov placed sufficient reliance upon an “amnesty” offered them to descend from the mountains, and, in the case of Malamboutov and some others, to meet with a remarkable fate. The incident has been thus described by the author of a diary published in the Posledniya Novosty:

As soon as he descended from the mountains, Malamboutov was seized by the local Che-Ka, and compelled to sign an “appeal” to such of his fellow Greens as had remained behind in hiding: the “appeal” stating, after referring to the Bolshevists’ “love of peace,” that “the only remaining foe of ourselves, of the Green Army, is the common foe of us all, the foe represented by Capitalism.” Then, the “appeal” issued, a posse of officials re-conveyed Malamboutov and his staff to the mountains, and had pointed out to them by their captives every hiding-place hitherto used by the Greens: with the result that for the next two days Malamboutov’s involuntary betrayal of his comrades caused the peasantry of the neighbouring villages to sit listening to heavy firing in the country where the Reds were running down the last remnant of the Greens. Later Malamboutov and his staff themselves were shot on the usual plea of “espionage,” and the fact posted up (under the repellent heading of “This is the class of crime which the soviet power most loves to punish”) on every street corner in the neighbouring town. In the list were sixty-four names, but it continued to be whispered amongst the terrified inhabitants that, though the Che-Ka might have succeeded in laying by the heels the persons named on the list, these represented no more than a fraction of the Greens who had accompanied Malamboutov from the mountains--that, as a matter of fact, the remainder of the two bands had discovered the treachery in time, and availed themselves of the fact that the “amnesty” had allowed them to retain their weapons to fight their way back again. And later their side avenged the death of Malamboutov with such cruel, such savage, reprisals upon every Communist whom they caught as to partake almost of a medieval character.

In fact, terrorism remained rampant in the south so long as the Greens continued their activities there. In Ekaterinodar, on a “mutiny” being quelled on September 27 and 28, the local Izvestia published a list of 104 executions which included a bishop, a priest, a professor, a military officer and a leading Cossack. And at Novorossisk, in the neighbourhood of which Green activity became especially noticeable, the Che-Ka attached to the Black Sea flotilla executed both rebels and hostages by hundreds, in addition to daily shootings in connection with a “liquidation” of twelve White Guard associations around Kharkov, and of the “conspiracies” which General Ouktomsky and Colonel Nazarov organised around Rostov.

Again, when, towards the close of March, the Che-Ka of Piatigorsk discovered a local “conspiracy,” there followed shootings of fifty of the “conspiracy’s” leaders; whilst at Anapa sixty-two persons were shot for attempting to escape from Bolshevism by way of Batoum, even though (as came out later) they had manifestly been egged-on to the attempt by agents-provocateurs employed by the local Che-Ka.

The following proclamation which Lautzer, “Special Representative of the All-Russian Che-Ka for the Northern Caucasus,” addressed to the populations of the Kuban district and the Black Sea littoral will illustrate better than anything else the state of things when those regions were held by the Bolshevists’ Don Army. Said the document:

(1) Any village or hamlet found to be harbouring persons connected with either the White Forces or the Green shall be razed to the ground, and its adult inhabitants shot, and its property confiscated. (2) Any person found assisting either of those Forces shall be shot. (3) Inasmuch as members of the Green Forces hiding in the mountains usually leave relatives behind them in their villages, such relatives shall be kept under observation and, if the forces in question advance any further, and the relatives concerned be found to have got any kinsman bearing arms against us, be shot, and the families of them deported to Central Russia. (4) Should anything in the nature of mass opposition display itself in village, settlement, or town, we shall, in our turn, be compelled to employ mass terrorism, and to execute hundreds of the inhabitants for each soviet worker who may be murdered. For the soviet power is determined that its heavy, ruthless hand shall sweep away its every foe.

Similarly were all rebellions in the Ukraine quelled, and no difference at all is discernible between the happenings of 1920 and those of 1921, save that sometimes the outbreaks came to assume such varying guises that it is not always easy to distinguish whether a rising was intended to procure the independence of the Ukraine, or to assist Makhno; whether it was connected with the Whites, or involved with the Greens; whether it was a movement of refugee bands, or a movement of purely peasant origin; whether it was a revolt against the weight of the grain tax, or an affair altogether apart from “White Guard conspiracies” and the foregoing factors. The only thing of which we can be certain is that at least the Bolshevists did not differentiate as regards these affairs’ quelling. For example, a “Special Order No. 69 Relating to the District of Kiev,” issued in 1920, enjoined not only all necessary employment of mass terrorism, but also infliction of death upon any person found possessed of a single cartridge after the expiration of any date for surrender of arms.

Thus Bolshevist terrorism needed but to encounter the smallest opposition to swell up into a sanguinary massacre. In Proskurovo alone 2000 peasants fell victims, and as soon as ever forces under the ataman Tiutiunik took the field in the neighbourhood of Kiev that city too began to see daily shootings of dozens. Below follows a résumé of an official document which is a copy of the minutes compiled by the five members of a Che-Ka committee which subsequently tried Tiutiunik’s beaten following. Issued on November 21, 1921, the document stated that during the fighting 400 of the enemy had been killed and 557 taken prisoner, and some of the rebels’ leaders, on realising the hopelessness of their position, compelled to commit suicide with bombs and rifles. Then the document added that Tiutiunik and certain of his staff had been guilty of “conduct unworthy of any persons in command,” in that they had assured their own escape from the field before the fighting had well begun. For the rest, the Che-Ka committee referred to tried 443 persons, of whom it shot 360 on the ground that they had been “evil and active bandits,” and forwarded the rest for further examination by “the inquisitional staff.” And later the Petrograd Pravda announced that “because of the conspiracy recently discovered in Kiev, a conspiracy directed by the All-Ukrainian Rebel Committee, 180 officers of Pethera’s and Tiutiunik’s forces have been placed under arrest.” And, that being so, we can pretty safely assume that it was not long before a subsequent communiqué announced those arrested officers’ execution.

Later, when a professor of the Kievan Polytechnic named Koval escaped from Kiev and reached Poland, he reported that yet another “discovery of a conspiracy of the usual type had led to an intensification of the Kievan Terror which involved nightly shootings of from ten to fifteen persons.”

And when an exhibition in advertisement of the doings of the local executive committee was held in the Pedagogic Museum, tables of the shootings gave, as a minimum monthly number of those shootings, 432.

Particularly large was the number of Petlura “conspiracies” then discovered. In connection with them sixty-three persons (including a Colonel Evtikhiev) were shot in Odessa, batches of fourteen and sixty-six in Tiraspol, thirty-nine in Kiev (mostly members of the intelligentsia), and 215 in Kharkov--the victims in the latter case being Ukrainian hostages slaughtered in retaliation for the assassination of certain Soviet workers and others by rebels. And, similarly, the Izvestia of Zhitomir reported shootings of twenty-nine co-operative employees, school teachers and agriculturists who could not possibly have had anything to do with any Petlura “conspiracy” in the world.

Everywhere, too, we read in Bolshevist journals such communiqués as: “Five counter-revolutionary organisations, covering the whole of Podolia, have been discovered,” “Sixteen persons have been shot at Chernigov,” and the rest. Hence it is no more than the truth to say that the mass of such official printings renders individual distinction between them almost impossible.

Akin to the fate of the Ukraine was the fate of White Russia, where the year 1921 proved particularly prolific of reports of “rebellions,” and of accounts of punitive expeditions dispatched to shoot--with or without trial--all who had participated, or been reported as participating, in those “rebellions.” “Dozens of persons were shot daily,” a correspondent of the Dielo has stated. “In particular were many White Russian leaders put to death. At Minsk a trial of Savinkov supporters has just ended. Seven have been executed.” Also the English Daily Mail’s correspondent at Reval wrote: “Here, during September, forty-five persons were shot.”

To the Che-Kas of Podolia and Volhynia there was entrusted the special duty of “cleansing” the two provinces of all who had displayed pro-Polish sympathies during the Polish occupation; and this process of “cleansing” the Che-Kas was effected with the usual mass arrests, the usual mass deportations to the central provinces, and the usual mass executions.

Hence there seems to have been always an intimate connection between “movements of rebellion” and wholesale shootings of Left Social Revolutionaries, of Anarchists, and even of Tolstoyan Anarchists, the most pacific of the sections of the Anarchical group--mostly, in the case of the latter, for refusals to serve in the Bolshevist Red Army; and an authoritative pamphlet on the subject which has been published in Berlin says, after citing a large number of instances of the kind:

We could go on citing instances indefinitely, and so use them as to carry conviction that even the most painstaking historian of the future could never collate a volume of material which, compared with our own volume, would figure otherwise than as a drop of water beside all the seas.

To describe the Russian Anarchist movement, or such of its curious manifestations as more than once led the late Prince Kropotkin to dissociate himself from its policy, is no part of my purpose; but at least it may be said that, though the Bolshevists were never averse to availing themselves of the Anarchists’ assistance whenever such assistance happened to seem convenient, they, equally, never were averse to treating Anarchist elements with the utmost brutality whenever those elements anywhere made good a footing.

The above-mentioned Anarchist pamphlet also reprints an important telegram which the Central Government dispatched to Rakovsky, then head of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Deputies, with regard to preparations for suppressing Anarchist organisations in Southern Russia. The message, a confidential one, said:

Let all Anarchists within Ukrainian territory, but more especially amongst Makhno’s entourage, be placed under surveillance forthwith, in order that there may be prepared against them any evidence--preferably evidence criminal in nature--which may prove useful in the future towards indictment of such persons. But also do you keep both this order and that evidence secret, and do no more than issue instructions in so far as the message, for the present, demands. Only, wherever feasible, let Anarchists be arrested and arraigned at once.

And upon the Crimea followed Siberia: and, upon Siberia, Georgia. Acting by itself alone, the Trans-Caucasian Che-Ka made thousands of arrests, and carried out hundreds of shootings. Relating his impressions of the Bolshevist régime in Tiflis during its first few days of being, a refugee from Batoum told the Roul’s correspondent in Constantinople that, during that time:

The town was wholly given up to pillage and rapine.... One night a friend of mine saw a huge pile of corpses--300 or so of them--lying in the Cathedral Square. All the house walls around them were bespattered with blood, and evidently a very large number of executions had taken place. In the pile were men and women, were old and young, were military and civilian, were Georgian and Russian, were rich and poor.

The officials most active in the region were the infamous Peters already mentioned, the Artabekov who had ravaged the Northern Caucasus, and the notorious sailor Pankratov--the last-named a man who, after assisting to quell the Astrakhan rising, and distinguishing himself in Siberia, had transferred his energies to Baku, where on the island of Nargen he slaughtered over 100 intellectuals and industrial workers.

Meanwhile, what was happening in the centre of Russia, where civil war had been over for a long time past, and the immediate results of such war had faded? There happened what took place everywhere else during 1921; there hundreds of persons were being shot either for having participated in some real or invented conspiracy, or for having vented some hasty protest against the Bolshevist tyranny, or because (this happened most often of all) their execution was capable of being presented in the guise of a belated punishment for a real or an invented criminal offence. Of this latter class a good instance is a Pskov trial of a group of chemists, merely for having sold alcohol, with a brutal execution of eight of their number; whilst a trial of some officials of the State Defence Department in Moscow in October led to ten or twelve more shootings; and other persons were awarded the death sentence for alleged abuses in their work at the Commissariats of Finance and Public Health. Vishniak’s book, The Black Year, also records that, taking the month of June alone, tribunals shot, during that period, in Moscow 748 persons, Petrograd 216, Kharkov 418, and Ekaterinodar 315.

As regards the first three months of 1922, figures of Che-Ka exploits are to be gained from the Posledniya Novosty of May 5, which cites an official report for the period, and quotes items of 4300 persons shot, and 114 risings quelled, for the twelve central provinces, added to mass shootings in Yaroslavl, Saratov, Kazan, and Koursk, and to a total of 347 shot in Moscow during the month of January alone. Similarly, the Golos Rossii obtained information from the statistical branch of the Commissariat of Transport to the effect that during 1921 the “railway courts” shot, on their own responsibility, 1759 victims--passengers and employees alike.

Besides, shootings took place from which every human sentiment would instinctively revolt. An instance is the execution of five lads, out of twenty-seven put on their trial, at Orel.

In Odessa, also, the dispersal of the All-Russian Committee for Assistance of the Starving was followed by the shooting of twelve persons whom the Odessan Izvestia alleged to have been connected with that organisation. And when six persons succeeded in escaping from the concentration camp at Ekaterinburg the director of the “Department of Penal Labour” proceeded to the camp from Moscow, had the ex-officers confined in the camp paraded before him, selected twenty-five, and shot them out of hand “as a warning to the rest.”

Again, that autumn sixty-one persons were shot in Petrograd in connection with the so-called “Tagantsev conspiracy,” whilst a rising at Kronstadt so alarmed the Bolshevists that they shot sailors in thousands. Also, according to a statement published in the German journal, Frankfurter Zeitung, the naval garrison of Petrograd lost 2500 men between February 28 and March 6. And a few of their number who contrived to escape to Finland reported that the shootings were carried out on the ice of the frozen river before the Fortress of SS. Peter and Paul. Oranienbaum’s quota in the same connection, it has been estimated, was 1400, and included amongst its victims six priests who somehow had got mixed up with the affair.

Similarly, a Saratov Social Revolutionary and Menshevist conspiracy--to be more exact, rebellion--which the excessive taxations in kind had evoked, was followed by local mass arrests and shootings, though, of course, the official communiqué said that only “twenty-seven” had been shot; and we do not know the real figure--we know only that a large number of hostages selected from amongst school teachers, professional men, and ex-Tsarist officers and officials was seized in anticipation of a peasant rising, and eventually shot in the local gaols; and that in connection with that, or with some other, “conspiracy,” a batch of fifty-eight Social Revolutionaries of the Left were executed for “banditism”--in reality for participation in the rising.

Again, a railway workers’ rebellion in Ekaterinoslav had, as a sequel, a list of “fifty-one” victims, which means, probably, that the true number was considerably larger. Indeed, we read in Z. U. Arbatov’s reminiscences, entitled Ekaterinoslav, 1917–1920, that after 200 workmen had been arrested, and fifty sentenced to execution at once, the rest were, later, and by night, conveyed in two motor-lorries (the date being June 2) to a spot on the river Dnieper where, with a machine-gun trained upon them from behind, the whole were so shot that their bodies fell into the water, to be carried away by the current, and only a few were left stranded on the margin. And later more railway employees were sentenced and executed by the All-Ukrainian Che-Ka at Kharkov. The foregoing details Arbatov had from Bolshevists’ own statements. A minor rising at Kronstadt was suppressed in the same manner.

At Byisk a “conspiracy” led to 500, or more, arrests and eighteen shootings; a “conspiracy” (of ex-officers and koulaki) in the Semiriechen district to forty-eight shootings; and a “conspiracy” at Elizabetgrad to shootings of fifty-five out of eighty-five persons arrested.

Next, the period arrived when Cossack refugees began to be compulsorily restored to their homes from overseas. They reached home to find not an amnesty, but punishment, awaiting them. A Cossack named Chouvillo who contrived to escape from Yisk after he had been repatriated thither subsequently informed certain foreign-published Russian journals that, out of a party of 3500 of his comrades, as many as 894 had been shot. This statement may have been exaggerated, but at least no doubt exists that there were frequent shootings of legally or illegally repatriated Cossack officers; many such cases stand recorded for the year under review (1921). A correspondent of the Parisian Russian National Committee has informed us, in an article entitled “The Return” (an article based upon items which Odessan Bolshevist journals themselves had published), that as soon as the S.S. Reshed Pasha reached Novorossisk from Constantinople during the April of 1921, 30 per cent. of her passenger complement of 2500 were shot, and that the same had been done after a previous trip of hers with 1500.

In our own case the officers and soldiers on board were shot at once; whilst of the previous party of 1500, 500 were shot at once, and the remainder dispatched to various concentration camps of the north, where certain death awaited them.

And even a respite from execution in no way guaranteed security against execution in the future. This we learn from a letter as recent as the November or the December of 1923 which was published in No. 16 of the Kasachyi Doumy (“Cossack Opinion”), and says, amongst other things, that no one who landed at Novorossisk at the period of which I am speaking could have failed often to hear the code phrase, “To be set apart for service in Mogilev.” So much, then, for the system of deporting the compulsorily repatriated to the interior. Only the innocence of a credulous foreigner could have made Dr. Nansen believe that he found social rights still existent in Soviet Russia, or state, on April 21, 1923, that, “with regard to repatriations of Cossacks from the Balkan States, the Soviet Government is keeping faith in this respect, and fulfilling all undertakings given,” seeing that those undertakings had been defined by two clauses saying:

(1) That the Soviet Government binds itself herewith to extend the amnesties of November 3 and November 10 to all Russian refugees repatriated through the good offices of the High Commissioner of the League of Nations; and (2) that the Soviet Government binds itself herewith to afford Mr. John Garvin and other accredited representatives of Dr. Nansen in Russia every facility for holding unhindered converse with repatriated refugees, to the end that such representatives may verify the fact that the Soviet Government is applying the amnesties named to all refugees without exception.

And if Dr. Nansen could add to the above statement the words, “Certainly, two repatriated refugees have been arrested for minor offences, but already delegates from myself are negotiating with the Government with regard to these two persons’ fate,” his faith in the written word of a Bolshevist and his ignorance of Russian realities must alike have been great! For how could a private person--even a delegate from the High Commissioner of the League of Nations--control an independent Soviet Government with regard to that Government’s refugees, seeing that for such a purpose a State would need to have been formed within a State, and provided with its own secret service? Besides, the policy of the Soviet Government is a policy capable always of postponing its wreakings of revenge, so that persons may “disappear,” may be sent into exile, or thrown into gaol, long after they have been granted official guarantees of immunity.

Is any further proof of the existence of such a policy required? Proof can be discovered at every turn. A good instance is a case tried before the Military Tribunal of Moscow. During the year 1919 an officer named Chougounov deserted from the Red Army, but returned to Russia four years later, and was put upon his trial. True, he expressed “whole-hearted repentance,” and, the locality whence he had returned being Poland, he had, before returning thence, obtained from the Russo-Ukrainian Mission in that country a licence to return, and a recommendation to the All-Russian Executive Committee that he should be reinvested with civil rights; yet on May 18 he was arrested, brought before the Military Tribunal of Moscow, and, “in view of his whole-hearted repentance, and of his voluntary return to Russia, and of his class origin” (he was a peasant’s son) sentenced only to a term of--ten years’ “imprisonment in strict isolation”!

The Years 1922 and 1923.

Certain persons, particularly foreign visitors who have scraped together a superficial acquaintance with Russian life (M. Herriot is an example of the type), declare that terrorism in Russia is a thing of the past.

Well, even if we suppose that figures issued by the foreign-published Russian press were invariably exaggerated (including the figures said to have been derived from the Bolshevists’ Commissariat for Foreign Affairs itself, and stating that 2372 persons were shot during the month of May 1922 alone), the figures, whether exaggerated or not, are still horrifying as indicating the extent to which political life in Russia had become extinct, the country come to resemble a skeleton-strewn field, and all energy to rebel, all will to vent an open protest, fled from an abject, nerveless, supine population. Indeed, I should be only too glad to believe that the figures were exaggerated. Again, according to figures issued by the State Political Department itself, the O.G.P.U., a continuation of the Che-Ka organisation, 262 persons were shot during January and February 1922, and 348 during April, and 164 (including seventeen priests) during the one night of May 7–8, and 187 (at Kharkov) and 209 in Kharkov Province, and 200 in Petrograd, during May in general; even if we suppose that these figures, too, were exaggerated it was at least hypocrisy on Stallin’s part when he informed the Muscovite branch of the Communist Party in August of the year named that “we shall have to resort to terrorism,” and, in defence of the mass arrests of intellectuals then being carried out, to say:

Before long our enemies will be forcing us back upon Red Terrorism, and compelling us to reply to their activities with such measures as were necessitated during the years 1918 and 1919. So let those enemies remember that we do not fail to keep our promises. Already their experiences during the two years named should have taught them that much.... It is for those who sympathise with our political adversaries to dissuade them from going too far, from over-stepping permissible bounds of opposition to our policy. For unless they cease from those activities, we shall be forced to resume usage of a weapon which we should never have used at all if we had not seen our warnings disregarded. To our adversaries’ stealthy blows we must oppose blows open, stern, directed against every adverse quarter, whether actively or passively operative.

For there was no need for such threats: still vivid before the public memory were executions of churchmen for opposing confiscation of ecclesiastical property--the most dastardly executions that could possibly have been conceived, seeing that they were due merely to the mildest of protests against ecclesiastical spoliation, even as was the case in July last, when the Revolutionary Tribunal of Petrograd tried sixteen members of local religious communities, and condemned eleven of them to death--the condemned including Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd, himself. And to this, and to the earlier case in Moscow, when fifty-four ecclesiastics were tried, and twelve of them sent for execution, there must be added instances in the provinces of Chernigov, Poltava, Smolensk, Archangelsk, Staraya Roussa, Novocherkassk, and Vitebsk, where clergy were shot in batches of from one to four on charges of having protested against despoilment of sacred ornaments.

With these executions for clerical “counter-revolution” went shootings after purely political trials on charges of having belonged to non-existent “counter-revolutionary organisations.” And trials of the sort are still going on: as recently as February 22, 1922, the Posledniya Novosty published a striking letter concerning the “liquidations” of some risings in the Ukraine which said: “Such ‘liquidations’ constitute, in reality, a war of extermination whose object is to finish off any intellectuals who have survived previous efforts of the sort.” And take the following extract from a letter written by a refugee from Proskurovo during January of that year. It says:

Owing to the almost incredible terrorism which has been rampant here (in Proskurovo) during the past few months, people have been compelled to escape whilst there was yet time. Such intellectuals as remained behind the Bolshevists are already arresting.... Koritsky, Chouikov, and my brother have been shot. Our Elder committed suicide just before he was led out to execution. And his wife is a prisoner in the local gaol.... Many have been put to death for participating in a “conspiracy.” Twenty-three were shot on the 18th last.... As the victims were being led out to be slaughtered nine of their companions burst through the gaol doors, and escaped. I, too, succeeded in doing that when my turn came. This was during the fourth series of arrests.... How you may be thankful that you have got clear of Proskurovo! At least you have escaped the spectacle of wives and mothers and children waiting outside the Che-Ka building on execution days!... None of the persons executed had had anything to do with political agitation at all. Most of them had merely agreed with the “Ukraine Movement.” They fell victims to evidence concocted by the Che-Ka itself. In fact, the Che-Ka has concocted the whole of this “Proskurovo conspiracy” on the usual degraded lines which Che-Kas affect.

And for news of similar terrorist orgies in other quarters of the Ukraine we need but scan the files of the Golos Rossii, or of the Posledniya Novosty, for 1922, when we shall see there excerpts from the Bolshevist press which tell of repeated executions of members of Savinkov’s and Pethura’s followings--of 12 members in Kharkov, of 25 in Odessa, of 55 in Nikolaevsk, of several in Minsk, of 8 in Gomel, of 10 in the Northern Caucasus, of 10 in Pavlograd, of 10 in Semipalatinsk Province (according to some sources, of 5), of 12 in Simbirsk Province (out of 42 found to be in possession of Antonov’s proclamations), of 68 in Maikop (amongst them women and young boys--all shot “to intimidate their fellow-bandits, since with the return of spring the rebels are losing their sense of fear”), of 13 (from amongst a group known as the Berdiansk Constitutional-Revolutionary Association) in Melitopol, and of 13 (students, these) in Kharkov. Then we must add to these the shooting of the General Staff of the Don Army--a shooting which became the more known because it included the shooting also of two Communists; the trial of the Nobel employees; the trials of repatriated émigrés; the execution of Shishkin, the Social Revolutionary, by the Muscovite Revolutionary Tribunal for refusing to testify before that court, and dubbing it “a mere organ of Bolshevist revenge”; the murder of Colonel Peshkourov of Yaroslavl as a participator in the Savinkov rising of 1918; the execution of 13 officers at Krasnoyarsk; the trial of the Karelian rebels; an execution of 148 Kievan Cossacks for mutiny; the arrest of 260 sailors after a naval conspiracy at Odessa; and a batch of executions at Odessa for a local strike.

From Riga, on August 5, a correspondent of the Golos wrote:

During the past week both the O.G.P.U. and the revolutionary tribunals have been actively engaged in carrying out mass arrests and passing death sentences. At Petrograd ten persons have been condemned to death by the local revolutionary tribunal. In Esthonia a trial has been held of the Esthonian Wholesale-Control Committee. At Saratov the local tribunal has condemned two social revolutionaries for stirring up a peasant rebellion in the Volsk district. And on July 29 the tribunal of Voronezh put to death a social revolutionary named Sharnov, and on the 28th passed death sentences upon eighteen officers previously captured in Northern Caucasia and the Trans-Caucasian and Don regions. The tribunal’s sentences were carried out in the concentration camp at Archangel, whither the officers had been sent at the end of 1920, or early in 1921. Amongst the victims were General Mouraviev (aged over seventy), Colonel Gandurin, and others.

Then there were cases which seem to have had, not a political, but some other basis: a shooting of three railwaymen at Kiev; a shooting of forty persons at Saratov for having looted provisions destined for the famine-stricken areas; a shooting of six railwaymen at Novocherkassk for theft; and some wholesale massacres at Tsaritsin, Vladimir, Petrograd, and elsewhere. Of course, not all of those condemned may actually have been put to death--indeed, we know that sometimes they were not; but also we know that journalistic news of death sentences reached the foreign press only as regards a tithe of those sentences, and that sometimes the Bolshevist press omitted any details of them at all. Thus the Posledniya Novosty once quoted from that press: “Shootings of persons convicted of accepting bribes have been taking place in large numbers,” and I myself can recall a special “week for combating bribery” (it was during my last few days in Russia, early in the October of 1922), and the fact that on the day of my departure I found the Brest railway station all plastered over with posters announcing the “week,” and that only subsequently I learnt that the “week’s” plans had been planned on a scale large enough to include hundreds, and even thousands, of arrests of railwaymen!

Z. U. Arbatov, who escaped from Russia by way of Minsk, has given us a vivid sketch of the city’s condition. He writes:

Affixed with tin-tacks to the wall of a carpenter’s shop we saw a list of names headed “Persons of the sort whom the Che-Ka punishes.” But just as my eye caught the figure “46” my companion dragged me away, and said hurriedly, “Oh, that is nothing. We have long been used to it. They put up a new list every day, and if one is seen reading it one runs the risk of being taken before the Che-Ka. You see, the saying is that no one would want to read it who had not got ‘enemies of the Soviet Power’ amongst one’s friends, since otherwise it wouldn’t be interesting enough. They shoot dozens daily.”

As regards the year 1923, let me first cite a report issued by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal. The report says that between the January and the March of the year in question the tribunal shot forty persons, and, during the May of that year, a hundred. Could anything be more eloquent? And from the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Che-Ka we have it that during the same period the State Political Department, the O.G.P.U., executed 826 persons “independently”--that is to say, illegally, in that only 519 of the 826 had been political offenders. At the same time it should be stated that later these findings led to three chiefs of branches of the O.G.P.U., fourteen “people’s prosecutors,” and certain other officials being dismissed. Again, from official Soviet publications which I was able to procure after I had left Russia, and from various correspondents of European journals, we glean items of the mass and individual executions of the year in question which enable us to divide the victims into the usual categories. Hence, first of all come executions for “counter-revolution.” A good example is the murder of the prelate Boutkievitz, which so shocked the whole civilised world that the reader will have no difficulty in remembering it. And then there come executions for having printed unauthorised political pamphlets. And then there come cases termed in the official reports “Details,” which were old affairs raked up after lapses of years--the shooting of a Savinkov agent named Sverzhevsky for planning to assassinate Lenin; the shootings of three and six members of the Union for Defence of Liberty and the Fatherland; the execution of M. F. Zhilinsky, a Muscovite member of a Savinkov organisation; the shooting of three officers of the “Olonetz Sharpshooters Division” for having caused that division to surrender to the British in 1919; the execution of thirty-three members of a counter-revolutionary organisation active at Nikolaevsko-Neznamovsk; the shooting of thirteen members of a Constitutional-Revolutionary organisation at Kiev; the trial of forty-four persons at Semipalatinsk, twelve of whom were sentenced to death; the shooting at Perm of two Kolchak officers (Drizdov and Timotheiev); the shooting at Omsk of Kolchak’s director of intelligence, Pospielov, an ex-Tsarist Crown Counsel--though previously he had been granted an “amnesty”; the shooting at Semipalatinsk of the Kolchak Government’s Chief Justice; the shooting in Moscow of Pravdin; the execution of Ishmourzin (ex-Commissary for the Bashkir Republic) for seceding to Kolchak; the trial, in Moscow, of Piestchikov, Okoulov, and Metkevich, ex-officers of Denikin’s army, on a charge of “espionage”; the shooting, in Moscow, of Serdinkov, late Vice-Commandant of Omsk; at Ekaterinoslav, of 28 “rebels”; at Podolsk, of 26 Petlura men (including a sergeant named Pogoutsky); in Volhynia, of 64 persons out of 340 condemned--the rest having their sentences remitted; in the Caucasus, of 9 members of a “rebel” group operative during 1923; in White Russia (where a correspondent reported “a great increase of terrorism”), of 10 “rebels”; in Chita, of a Colonel Ernelich and 6 confederates; in Rostov, of 5 persons; and everywhere of countless “bandits”--of 15 in Odessa, of 15 and 17 in Petrograd (including a number of women who had refused to betray their lovers), of 9 in Moscow, of 6 in Ekaterinoslav, of 5 in Berdichev, and of 8 in Archangel, whilst in Kharkov also 78 “bandit” trials were held, and in only a few instances the subsequent death sentences commuted to imprisonment “because of the accused’s proletarian origin,” or “in recognition of services rendered to the Revolution and the Proletariat.” And, finally, we have it from a correspondent of the Rousskaya Gazeta (“The Russian Gazette”) in Odessa that 16 local “bandits” were sentenced to death for “acts of terrorism against Communists.” Yet the term “banditism” should be viewed with great caution. An instance is seen in the fact that the Izvestia once wrote:

Last December the case of Soloviev’s White bandit supporters was brought before the provincial court of Enisey. Of the 106 persons arraigned, nine were condemned to death, with five who had forged railway tickets, some who had passed counterfeit money, and the like.

Also, we must remember the category of persons executed for “economic counter-revolution.” Instances are the manager of the Turkhestan Tobacco Company (for “negligence”), four forest wardens in Tomsk Province, three engineers employed by a concern called the Union Works, a man employed by the Principal Remount Depot (Topilsky, an ex-Social Revolutionary), some workers in the employ of the State Trading and Naval Stores Departments, an engineer named Verkhovsky and six others in Petrograd, a merchant trader of the Sukharev Market in Petrograd, four workmen for “sabotage,” and a batch of Communist traders for “unconscionable speculation in currency.” Also there was the affair of the Vladimirsky Club, together with executions for offences similar to the offence then alleged. And during the same year there occurred several cases of senseless, gratuitous official revenge for offences committed several years previously. Instances are the shooting of Lieutenant Stavraky for having helped to quell a mutiny in the Black Sea Fleet during 1905, the execution of seventy-six repatriated men of Wrangel’s Army, and the shooting of General Petrenko after returning home from Prince Island in reliance upon an “amnesty.” Again, my portfolio contains sundry items relating to offences connected with official duties--items relating to the shooting, in Moscow, of eleven employees of the Central Housing Department; to the trial, at Pskov, of one Porkhov and two other employees of the local revenue office; to a trial of employees of the Viatka educational department for acceptance of bribes; to trials of members of local Che-Kas and revolutionary tribunals for lapses of official duty (a perfect wave of “official duty” trials seems to have swept over Russia); to the trial of a member of the Archangel revolutionary tribunal; and to a trial of the head of the Doubosarsky (Tsaritsin) criminal investigation department--the two last for having tortured victims before shooting them.

And what of the many executions of the year which were never reported at all? That such executions took place I am certain. For example, no journal ever reported the shooting of nineteen Savinkov supporters during the May of 1923, though I possess well-founded information that it took place, and that, of the nineteen then executed, thirteen had had no connection whatsoever with the offence alleged against them. And it was only when Sinovary was giving evidence before the tribunal at Lausanne that the world first learnt that P. I. Smirnov had been arrested during the previous April in connection with the Savinkov affair, and shot in Petrograd during the following January.

And what of Georgia, now supposed to have become a Communist State? The same as everywhere else: the usual quellings of the usual risings. In this connection we learn best of local conditions from certain Bolshevist press accounts of the rebellion and the suppression of 1922. Those accounts include an order to the inhabitants which, though by no means new in its contents, is at least instructive.

All inhabitants (the Order said) must report to the authorities and representatives of the Red Army both the Christian and the family names of any bandit who is known to them, and of any person who is harbouring such a bandit, with the whereabouts of any person soever who is hostile to the Soviet Power.

These Georgian risings were succeeded by Georgian “conspiracies”: and journals of the day contain resultant lists of names of from fifteen to ninety-one persons shot, with the executed described, in every case, as former princes or aristocrats or generals who had turned “bandit,” whereas, as a matter of fact, the overwhelming majority of them had belonged to the plain Socialist or Democrat intelligentsii where they had not been merely rural schoolmasters, or co-operative employees, or industrial workers, or peasants, and the like, or known to all just as members of the Georgian Social Democratic Party.

On July 5, 1923, the Central Committee of the Party just named published an address to the Central Committee of the local Communist Party and the local Soviet of People’s Commissaries. The address said:

Since November and December last large numbers of Socialist working people and peasants have been perishing at your executioners’ hands, and thousands of others finding themselves forced to flee for refuge to the wilds, lest they find themselves expelled from Georgia, or thrown into prison. And even this, it would appear, has not sufficed you, for you are torturing incarcerated comrades in your dungeons, and causing them such moral and physical suffering as in not a few cases has deprived them of reason, and, in others, crippled them for life where it has not killed them outright. From 700 to 800 persons are lying in your Che-Ka dungeons, or in the Metekhsky Fortress, at this moment.

The Year 1924

This year, too, must be begun with similar items--with, first of all, the case of the “spy” Dziubenko, an ex-lieutenant-colonel of Kolchak’s army who, brought before the military division of the Supreme Court in Moscow, was sentenced to death and sequestration of his property. Subsequently the Izvestia reported: “Dziubenko had his sentence carried out within the legal period.” Then there is the case of the “spy” Khrousevich, an ex-instructor attached to the Kronstadt Artillery School, upon whom the same tribunal similarly passed sentence of death. And from a correspondent of the Dni we learn of a shooting of some workmen merely for having gone on strike, and of a session of the Verkhne-Tagilsky “district circuit section of the provincial court” at which five unemployed and another man were sentenced to death for having, during January, “promoted disturbances in factories, and cessations from industrial work.” All these sentences were duly carried out, and from a pamphlet published by the Georgian Labour Group in February we learn that in Baku, for the same offence, eight Russian and three Georgian workmen were executed by the Transcaucasian branch of the O.G.P.U.--the pamphlet citing as authority for its statement a letter sent to the Dni by a Muscovite correspondent.

Hence during this year we find ourselves in the presence of the usual orgy of death sentences. In particular, the O.G.P.U. staged a great political trial in Kiev, the pretext for which was an allegation that the O.G.P.U. had discovered in Kiev a great counter-revolutionary organisation styled “The Kievan Centre of Action.”

The present shootings are endless [wrote a refugee to the Novoyé Vremya (“The New Times”)], with, as the only difference, the fact that things now are done more circumspectly than formerly was the case. For example, an inhabitant of Tambov will be sent to be executed in Saratov, and a Saratovian elsewhere, and so forth, so that all tracks may be covered up, and, on a given person disappearing, no one may be able to find him again.

I can vouch that the statement embodies a fact.

* * * * *

Attempts have been made to determine totals. But what use is that, seeing that probably the black pall under which the sanguinary events of latter-day Russian life have lain concealed these five years past will never be lifted, and that to the end history will have to stand vainly outside the locked doors which admit to the Red Statistical Chamber? In the White Sea, it is said, fishermen’s nets still keep dragging up corpses of Solovetski monks, lashed wrist to wrist with barbed wire.

However, once a correspondent of the Roul, a writer named Egeny Komnin, did essay to compile a table of totals, and below I will give the conclusions of his attempt accurately to estimate them.

By the winter of 1920 [he wrote] the number of provinces included within the R.S.F.S.R. was fifty-two, and they had fifty-two Che-Kas, and fifty-two special branches, and fifty-two provincial revolutionary tribunals. And then there existed all the swarm of regional-transport Che-Kas, railway tribunals, tribunals of “internal defence” (the “Internal Service Force”), and circuit sessional courts--these last being commissions periodically sent from the centre to supervise local mass shootings. And there were the special branches and special tribunals attached to the several armies (which, again, numbered sixteen), and the special branches and tribunals attached to the several divisions of those armies. Hence, in all, we may assume that there existed fully a thousand torture chambers--or, if we take into account also the activities of the district Che-Kas at that period, more than a thousand; considerably more. And later, as the R.S.F.S.R. still further increased the number of its provinces (Siberia and the Crimea and the Far East becoming overrun), that increase must have been accompanied by an increase in the number of the torture chambers. Whence, taking the Bolshevists’ own totals for 1920 (though during that year no real decrease of terrorism set in--merely it was that acts perpetrated by terrorism began to be reported less frequently), we can fix upon a certain definite figure for the daily average of killing per torture centre, and see thence that the curve of shootings rose from one to fifty as regards the larger centres, and from one to one hundred as regards regions in recent occupation by the Red Army. And since terroristic outbursts always were periodical in their outbreaking and their decreasing, a modest estimate of the average will work out at five persons per diem per torture centre, or, if multiplied by 1000 (the total number of torture centres), at 5000 persons per diem, or 2,500,000 per annum for the country as a whole. And to think that for six years past, or more, this Medusa’s Head has been waving over the ashes of our fatherland!

Che-Kas are said also to have appointed special officials, “corpse numberers,” for the purpose of keeping tally of the dead. The fact, surely, speaks for itself?